Thursday, May 12, 2005
If Search Engines Could Read Your Mind:
"By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor - May 11, 2005
What if a search engine knew exactly what you were thinking, and unerringly provided perfect search results? The idea is not as farfetched as it sounds.
When people complain about 'poor quality' or 'irrelevant' search results, they almost never blame their own poorly formed request—yet bad queries are a huge part of the problem. It's actually quite remarkable that search engines can take a sparse two or three word query and make sense of it. Lacking context, search engines are forced to virtually guess at your true intent.
If only we searchers would spell out our needs in greater detail, search engines wouldn't need to rely so heavily on unreliable heuristics and other techniques that are imperfect indicators of meaning. Our laxity is one reason why most search engines offer search refinement tools, suggesting additional query terms, clustering results into conceptually related topics or otherwise trying to extract more clues about what a searcher is really looking for.
These refinement tools are relatively primitive, but for good reason—most of us are too lazy to take advantage of them. When we do, our results often improve. But more often than not we're in too big of a hurry to get results. We'd much rather waste time scanning results and clicking back and forth among less-than-useful pages than craft a really good query or use search refinement tools..."
"By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor - May 11, 2005
What if a search engine knew exactly what you were thinking, and unerringly provided perfect search results? The idea is not as farfetched as it sounds.
When people complain about 'poor quality' or 'irrelevant' search results, they almost never blame their own poorly formed request—yet bad queries are a huge part of the problem. It's actually quite remarkable that search engines can take a sparse two or three word query and make sense of it. Lacking context, search engines are forced to virtually guess at your true intent.
If only we searchers would spell out our needs in greater detail, search engines wouldn't need to rely so heavily on unreliable heuristics and other techniques that are imperfect indicators of meaning. Our laxity is one reason why most search engines offer search refinement tools, suggesting additional query terms, clustering results into conceptually related topics or otherwise trying to extract more clues about what a searcher is really looking for.
These refinement tools are relatively primitive, but for good reason—most of us are too lazy to take advantage of them. When we do, our results often improve. But more often than not we're in too big of a hurry to get results. We'd much rather waste time scanning results and clicking back and forth among less-than-useful pages than craft a really good query or use search refinement tools..."
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